MOVIE REVIEWS: WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING

The best thing that What to Expect When You’re Expecting has got going for it is its production budget — it cost only $25 million to make. And although the film’s publicists have been working overtime trying to find a hook that will appeal to men, it has been tracking heavily among females — only. Peter Howell of the Toronto Star, one of the few critics to give the film something less than a devastating review, nevertheless suggests that it ought to come with a “cuteness alert.” Otherwise, he writes, it promises “a few laughs and some nods of recognition.” And Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times halts himself in mid-review for being too “snarky,” and then virtually apologizes. “This is a good-hearted movie with some winning performances,” he concedes, “but it has so many characters … that the plot nearly stalls with gridlock. It’s clever but the stories are thin soup.” Otherwise, the reviews could abort any possibility of the movie’s success if enough people actually read them. Melissa Moseley in the New York Daily News says that it “may be the first movie to actually induce morning sickness.” Actually, says Faran Smith Nahme in the New York Post, the movie “isn’t as charmless as you might have feared, largely due to a cast working furiously to sell every scene.” That cast includes Matthew Morrison, Cameron Diaz, Elizabeth Banks, Chris Rock, Jennifer Lopez, Dennis Quaid, Brooklyn Decker, Rodrigo Santoro, Anna Kendrick and Chace Crawford. But, writes Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times, that cast adds up to so many characters that “the filmmakers should have considered bringing on someone from ESPN’s ‘SportsCenter’ to give us the play by play.”